Abortion

Culture

10,000 Solutions is a site that Arizona State University has launched where anyone in the world can give a solution facing the world, like sustainability or the future of education, and it offers a $10,000 prize. More than that, participants are encouraged to collaborate and build on one another’s solutions. ASU wants to create an open solutions bank that others can use to generate new ideas, and some students at ASU have already met up in person to talk over things they shared on the site. The school is promoting 10,000 Solutions as an experiment in collaborative invention and the National Science Foundation is funding a team of ASU researchers to study the contest and see how ideas are shared and developed.

Are we living in a world with information apartheid? Sandra Fisher-Martins makes a compelling argument that the daily, public documents have so much jargon and complexity that only a portion of the population can truly understand it. These include insurances, tenet leases, sub-prime mortgages. We need a culture of clarity. So how do we do this? One is to raise literacy levels. Of course this needs to be done, but it’s slow and hard. Moreover, even with having high literacy rates doesn’t get rid of the misunderstandings of complex documents. For those who are in college or above, read your insurance claims or mortgage documents. The other solution is to lower the complexity of the documents, to make it in simple language, so that it’s more accessible. Indeed, Fisher-Martin argues that everyone has a right to understand:

Economics

Milton Wolf, cousin of President Obama, challenges the Occupy movement and asks them to join the Tea Party. The goals are the same, it’s just that the Occupy movement is confused on what they are against: “It’s time to end crony capitalism. The occupiers, it seems, have confused crony capitalism with capitalism. One is tyranny. The other is freedom. One is autocracy. The other is the free market. Crony capitalism is to capitalism, as blogger Diana Hsieh says, as sea horses are to horses. America gasps for a return to free-market capitalism. Americans suffer today not because of the free market but because of a lack of access to it.”

Polyamory

Religion

William Lane Craig and Stephen Law had a recent religious debate. You can see the debate mapped out here.

Science

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene presents The Fabric of the Cosmos, a four-part look at the “mind-boggling reality beneath the surface of our everyday world.” The first segment, “What Is Space?”. Then come the remaining installments – “The Illusion of Time” (11/9), “Quantum Leap” (11/16), and “Universe or Multiverse?” (11/23). If you can’t catch the episodes on TV, they will be streamed online too at video.pbs.org. See the preview below:

Sexuality

Where gay couples can adopt:

“Do you believe that women should have the right to:

Vote?

Go to college?

Drive a car?

Open bank accounts in their own names?

Enjoy sex?

Work in whatever occupation they might choose, and get paid the same as men when they do the same work?

Wanna solve America’s teen sex problem? Perhaps having the mentality of the Dutch may be useful: “Schalet’s book compares the sexual attitudes of American and Dutch parents and her findings are nothing short of staggering: Whereas most American parents panic about the idea of allowing their kids to have sex with other kids under their roof, for many Dutch parents, it’s not only fine — it’s responsible parenting.”

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About shaunmiller

I am a Ph. D student at Marquette University. The primary purpose of this blog is to get my ideas out there, and then have other people scrutinize, critique, build upon, and systematize beliefs. This blog will sometimes pertain to what I'm learning in my classes, but it will occasionally deal with non-classroom issues that I'm thinking about as well.